TVs, Videos, Cameras

The "SmarTV" system described has the same features as Tivo ("a
black box about the size of a 19-inch TV set"), except it runs on a
jukebox of video tapes. See this
1989 CBR article and this
1989 NYT article, which dares to ask: "If millions plug into a TV
system that eliminates commercials, who will pay for the programs they
want to watch?"

There's a lot of information online about the SmarTV, or at least
more than about most of these products. An internal technical
memo from 1989 shows that the Metaview company eventually
envisioned the technology being incorporated into VCRs, not sold as a
standalone box. Here are a bunch
more press clippings.

SmarTV was demoed at the 1990 CES. Press reports put its price
varyingly at $3500/1990 and $6000/1989. I can't find any evidence that
it was ever sold.

Post-VCR pre-Tivo, the only successful TV watching system I know of
was VCR Plus+ (not to be confused with C++). This system lets you type
in a numeric code (published in TV Guide) to record a certain
program, instead of making you manipulate a complex interface that's
different for every VCR. It's built into VCRs now, but it used to be a
separate helper product with its own remote control (unless the thing
I remember was a different product).

The Future Stuff article describes HDTV pretty accurately: 16:9
aspect ratio, you'll have to buy a new TV, there are competing
standards, etc.

As often happens, they got the timeline wrong. According to random
webpage, HDTV sets were first sold in 1998, starting at $5000/1998
($3700/1989, $6100/2007). But regular HDTV broadcasts only started in
earnest a couple of years ago.

Most mid-range TVs on the market today can display HDTV signals
(you still need a special tuner or cable box), at a cost of
$300-$500/2007. Relatively few people watch HDTV.

Back when they turned descriptive phrases into company names, "The
Interactive Game Network will allow viewers to play along without ever
leaving their living rooms." It's a parallel signal broadcast
alongside live events like sports games and game shows. Correctly
predict what will happen often enough and you'll win a prize.

This is a pretty anemic kind of interactivity that was talked about
a lot in the nineties but killed off by the Internet. A steady flow of
prizes makes a poor substitute for the social interaction of message
board bitching.

I also don't think they really thought the game show part
through. Game shows are not broadcast live. They're
syndicated filler that's broadcast at different times in different
parts of the country. Plus, you can't play most game shows with the
IGN's interface, a "control box" with which you can "choose answers or
options by pressing buttons."

PS: I suspect instead of actual prizes, this would have worked on a
point system. I further suspect this whole thing was not thought out
very well, despite the "100%" probability which means that the product
"exists in a form that can be marketed and sold."

We get an accurate description of an LCD flat-panel TV "so slim it can
hang on your wall like a picture." It's revealed that Sony sells a
flat TV with a 2.7" screen for $650/1989 ($1100/2007), but there's no
guess at the cost of a full-size TV.

Like HDTV, a pretty good
prediction, though again the timeline is off. Flat-panel TVs started
showing up in the late 90s at the very high end of the market, and
today most new TVs are flat-screen LCDs. Not predicted: that the same
technology would apply to computer monitors.

Not video on demand, but a portable video player. This one is the
Sony GV-8 and it plays those little camcorder tapes.

The GV-8 was released in the US (it was already out in Japan when
Future Stuff was published), and you can find old ones on eBay
today. But this idea never caught on until the video iPod in 2005, and
even now I'm not sure what the point is. "In the car, while taking
public transportation, readying a meal in the kitchen, or lying in a
hammock in the back yard" (Sony's Shinichi Takagi) are none of them
places I want to watch video on a tiny screen.

The predicted applications are amusingly similar to predictions of
the highbrow and business-oriented potential of other new media:
"Sales-training tapes could be viewed minutes before an appointment
and product demonstration videos could be shown to clients over
lunch." Now that's wholesome! Thought experiment: imagine the world in
which demonstration videos, not Powerpoint decks, became the accepted
way of conveying information in a corporate setting.

There's also a proposal that magazine publishers could start doing
video versions of their magazines. Aren't magazine publishers strapped
for cash as it is without this huge new capital outlay? But Sony's
Steve Hoechster claims that Japanese publishers did just this for the
GV-8. However I don't think I trust anyone with the last name of
"Hoechster".

Finally! Video! On! Demand! Not quite. Order videos over the phone and
they're delivered to you over your phone line as you sleep. In a
departure from normal Future Stuff predictology, the movies are
delivered not to a specialized box but to "your computer". Admittedly,
it's a specialized computer that "doubles as a TV," but they did
envision the 1980s version of a computer expanding into a greater home
role.

The name of the service is Advanced Broadcatching. "Broadcatching"
is now a term for downloading audio and video made available through
syndication feeds. That makes me think this term of art has been lying
in wait for 20 years for someone to implement something similar to
"order videos and they're delivered to you as you sleep."

It wasn't possible in 1999, but for the past couple years it's been
possible to use neo-broadcatching to fulfill the Future Stuff
dream of movies downloaded to your computer while you sleep. The
problem is that the companies that distribute the movies aren't
exactly buying in. "Those video rental stores" mentioned in Future
Stuff are indeed hurting, but it's mainly because of the Netflix
model, where you order videos over the phone (read: Web) and have them
delivered to you through the mail. An interesting blend of accurate
and missed predictions here.

"Steven Benton of the M.I.T. Media Lab" (who, according to the web,
did seminal work on holography, and died a few years ago) is brought
in to forecast the business implications. "[F]ree broadcasting as we
know it will cease to exist and everything will become pay TV." Benton
also seems to envision broadcatching techniques taking over movie
distribution altogether, to the extent that movie premieres would not
be glamorous semipublic events at movie theaters, but parties at the
director's house or something. I'm not totally that's sure what he's
saying so I'll just quote Future Stuff:

The movies available will include golden oldies, those
just-seen-at-a-theater-near-you, and quite possibly brand-new
films—even premieres. You could have the opening-night
festivities right in your living room. "Should be great for champagne
sales," says Benton.

I'm going to chalk this whole "premiere" thing up to a flight of
fancy brought on by the conceptual jump from old films to recent films
to new films.

Desktop publishing sure was a blast. It made your stuff look good even
if you didn't know what you were talking about. With desktop video,
you'll be able to equal the technical skill of "most cable
productions, with the same rolling, twisting, and turning of images,
as well as dissolves, fades, 3-D animation, and chromakey..."

"Commodore has the computer system, and they call it the Amiga
500." Future Stuff barely missed the chance to predict the
Video Toaster, which did come out in 1990 and became a cult hit. I
originally thought this was talking about the Video Toaster, but that
cost $1500/1990 on top of the $1500/1990 Amiga 2000. Maybe they
only talked to people at Commodore, who weren't exactly forthcoming
about third-party add-ons.

What ever the heck it's talking about, this entry conveys the
excitement of DIY video editing well, and it talks about a product
that actually arrived on schedule and made a noticeable impact.

"For over thirty years, 3-D has been little more than a fad and a lot
less than a major entertainment technology." And so it remains. On the
other hand, those 3-D "Magic Eye" puzzles were pretty popular in the
'90s. I'm calling this a toss-up.

No, just kidding. This is a Toshiba camcorder with two lenses and I
don't know what they were expecting, but it was a commercial
failure. According to this page
(w/picture), only 500 of the unwieldy devices were made, and
they're still sought by filmmakers. A videocamera that takes 3-D
images is kind of cool, but even in the 1980s I'd think the
development of said camera would be mostly a corporate charity product
and less something you'd do to make money.

The camera shoots to standard videotape, but you need a special
player and one of those sets of 3-D shutter glasses where only one
lens is open at a time. What do we have in this line today? Here's a $400/2007
add-on that makes any camcorder shoot in 3D. There's also The
Easy, Cheap, Disposable 3D Camcorder, which is just two camcorders
taped together.

Cassette recorders (audio and video) were essential to the 80s and
early-90s infovore. Dual-tape cassette recorders were common and let
you dub one tape onto another or perform a primitive kind of editing.
But with video casettes you couldn't even watch a video while
recording a TV show.

Future Stuff's dual deck VCR does solve this problem, but so
does having two VCRs. And $650/1989 doesn't sound like much less than
the cost of two VCRs at the time. Indeed, I had two VCRs for many
years, when I was collecting Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and
"circulating the tapes", but I never saw or thought of buying a
double-deck VCR.

GoVideo (né Go-Video)
is still in business and still (I think) sells
a double-deck VCR. Price is around $200/2007—about the cost
of two cheap DVD/VCR players.

Programming the VCR can be difficult. That's why Sharp has invented
the talking remote control, which works with a special VCR to guide you
through the process.

Really, VCR Plus+ is a better system. It
short-circuits the whole problem by turning the process of programming
a VCR into the process of looking a number up in a magazine and then
typing in the number. Sure, a few big corporations have to do a
little extra work every week to help maintain the simple interface,
but that's what they're there for.

"With the increasing sophistication of video equipment, talking
controls should become widespread." Thankfully, that didn't
happen. Voice control would have just been one more complicating
factor.

This is a voicemail-like system that gives you a phone-tree interface
for programming your VCR. I'm sure you'll be glad to hear it works
with both VHS and BETA VCRs: it acts like the VCR's infrared remote.

It looks like this was produced and sold, though Advanced Video
Dynamics is now out of business. Judging from the Future Stuff
description, it sounds like HAL made it easy to program a VCR from
work but did nothing to help when you were right there in the room
with it. But according to this
page, HAL also had a "Home Mode" where it acted just like (and was
cheaper than) the Talking VCR Remote Control covered earlier.

Again, VCR+ Plus is a better system, but HAL's functionality works
a lot like modern DVRs, which can be programmed over a network.

"Photography is going digital...[b]ut the quality isn't great and the
price is high." The architecture's kind of clunky too. Your photos are
recorded on a "miniature video floppy disk", and to see them you must
connect an expensive device to your TV. Then you can print them, or
send in the disk to the digital camera company. Which company this is
is not mentioned. The camera described sounds a lot like the 1991
Kodak DCS-100. The DCS-100 was sold with a large, unwieldy
visualization device, but it used a standard SCSI hard drive, so you
could connect it directly to a computer—specifically a Mac,
since back then SCSI was pretty high-end stuff in the PC world.

It's a big pain, but this primitive system does have the most
fundamental advantage of digital photography: it reduces the marginal
cost of taking a picture to almost zero. You'd have to take a
lot of pictures to justify it, though—and then discard
almost all of them, because the only long-term storage is paper or
those expensive-sounding video floppy disks, which bumps the marginal
cost back up.

Future Stuff takes the opportunity to predict Fark-style
Photoshop fakery by 1993. "By interconnecting with a computer, you
should be able to... make that telephone pole disappear or add a
beautiful sunset to pictures of your rained-out trip to the
Caribbean." They greatly underestimate the amount of skill this would
take.

Future Stuff now hedges its bets by mentioning memory cards as
an alternative to the previous entry's "video floppy disks". The
"credit-card-size" card has a capacity of about 2 megabytes, and moves
from your camera to (you guessed it) "a special playback device". Only
then can it go onto your personal computer (or "digital tape"). This
extra step is really aggravating, but very few computers back then
could have displayed a color photo.

Of course, by 1995, things were different. The personal computer was
the obvious and immediate destination for pictures taken on a digital
camera. Digital cameras were still expensive, but many of them wrote
to flash EPROM (though I don't think the chips were removable). There
were other ways of getting photos onto a computer—a friend once
had a digital camera that wrote to standard 3 1/2-inch
floppies—but there's continuity from this Future Stuff
entry to today's memory-card-based digital cameras.

The manufacturer here is Fuji, but there's no specific camera
mentioned—just the card the camera uses.

"Demonstrated on a vibrating platform, it produced rock-steady
pictures." It's the Canon L series 300mm lens! I know I wanted one for
Christmas.

The upside of all these camera-related entries is that camera geeks
have huge amounts of information online about every kind of camera. Here's
a primer on the L series of lenses, which look like scale-model
space stations. The downside is that I find it boring to go through
all this stuff. Fortunately, this is the last camera entry.

Future Stuff says Canon says the "optical compensator"
technology "should eventually find its way to even the simplest
snapshot camera." This did happen, at least for digital cameras. My
current camera's nothing special but it was advertised as having
vibration-compensating doodads. I did a test, waving the camera around
while taking a picture, and it came out fine. I was able to get blurry
photos with a longer exposure.

This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Monday, March 31 2008, 00:26:30 Nowhere Standard Time and last built on Tuesday, March 03 2015, 20:00:40 Nowhere Standard Time.